Access service operators including owners of private networks, such as businesses, or those offering public internet access such as airlines, aircraft and airports, as well as shopping malls, coffee shops, hotels, and general access Internet service providers offer Internet access to an audience that is essentially captive. Accordingly, access service operators have the opportunity to provide better targeted advertizing to their audience, or eliminate competing ads by blocking advertizing from competitors from being visible within the operator's computer network. Replacing or removing ads can also reduce network bandwidth usage in some cases, and therefore can lower costs in operating the access service. Thus, access service operators may be expected to have an incentive to employ techniques for providing targeted advertizing to end users, or to eliminate or restrict the advertizing on their networks.
End users may also wish to eliminate advertizing altogether, finding it obtrusive to their use of the Internet. In other cases, end users may prefer to receive advertizing that is better targeted to their personal interests on an opt-in basis. While digital advertizing is theoretically targeted and, in particular the use of re-targeting (i.e., showing an advertisement for something a particular user previously expressed interest in or purchased) is commonplace, in practice targeted advertizing is often clumsy, simplistic and/or unwelcome. Even when targeted advertizing is performed in more elegant ways, such targeted advertizing typically relies upon large amounts of data captured by using tracking cookies to build a picture of individual users before it becomes remotely accurate. Moreover, end users often opt out of such tracking when given the chance.
Accordingly, it may be desirable to generate improved targeted advertizing that overcomes some of the issues described above.